Simian Farmer

And our first number one hit would be, "Dangling Participles"

I got a little unbent at my wife the other night.  Nothing that Amy did, I just needed to vent a little and she was sitting innocently at the kitchen table, ready to absorb a random barrage of Simon's venial annoyances.  It had to do with music.

I think there's finally a song extant to usurp Alanis Morissette's long-held number one position atop my list of Worst Grammatical Offenders in music.  I don't even know what the name of the goddamn thing is, and I can't be bothered to spend the five minutes it would take to search the thing on teh internets.  It's that annoying to me.

I don't even know what most of the lyrics are, even though I've heard it a couple dozen times on the radio.  That's because I can't get out of my head the part that scrapes its fingernails down the chalkboard of my English pedantry. 

The very short bit goes thus: "Are we human... or are we dancer?"

That's it.  That's all I can recall from the song.  On top of that, the singer performs it in a voice that is a sort of soporific lament to existential angst, which only exacerbates the grammatical travesty.  The combination of those two factors makes me want to jam a sharpened No. 2 pencil into each ear and burn Stephen King books to keep alive my guttering hatred for blatant language abuses in the name of art.  (Nothing against King's books; his name just goes well with the pencil-in-ear scenario.)

Referring to "we" as a single dancer somehow grates against my entire being, and I can't quite place why that is.  "Dancer" should be plural, obviously.  Dancers.  Then the line would scan just fine.  "We" can all be human, speaking about mankind as a race.  Or "we" can be humans, individually.  Either of those is fine.  But "we" can only ever be dancers; we can never be dancer.

If I ever start up a rock band, I plan to call it "Strunk & White".

*****

OK, fine, I looked it up on YouTube. 

Hey, Adrian!

I'm sitting here on the couch in the living room watching Rocky III while the boys are in bed and Amy's at work.  It's Wednesday, and that means it's wing Wednesday after work for my wife.  She'll go to the bar, eat hot wings, have a couple pops, and climb into bed rubbing her cold butt on me some time after midnight.

I figured it would be a good night to update on recent goings on around here.

*****

Oktoberfest was last weekend, and every year since the first year I went with my wife has been better than that one.  I promised to pace myself this year and mostly managed to do that.  I only fell down once, at the end of the night, when one of my more influential friends, already under the aegis of a good helping of barley sandwiches, stood up, grinned blankly, and uttered three of the most catastrophic words any drunk man can fall victim to: "Let's get shots!"

I don't know whose idea it was, but it was tequila shots. 

It was mostly a good night.

*****

We booked a trip to Mexico in February.  Ever since our Cuba vacation last year, Amy and I have developed a hankering for beach resorts and child abandonment.  When one's kids are two and four, those things go great together.  I can't wait.

*****

Amy's going to Vegas this weekend.  The last woman in our group of "Superfriends" is getting married, and the stagette is going to be epic.  Apparently.  They have tickets to see Madonna in concert, and I've heard rumours that there will be an entire day spent at the Victoria's Secret outlet.

*****

(It's round three of the second fight now -- the one where Rocky comes back and kicks Mr. T's ass.  I can't believe how bad this is.)

*****

I donated plasma today, as I try to do on a weekly basis.  (With fair to middlin' success.)  It was my 99th donation, so I'm kinda stoked to hit the magic 100 mark next week.  There was a local guy who got on the news a couple months back for having made his 800th donation.  I figure if I can average 40 donations a year, I can hit that in 18 more years.  Then I can hit 1,000 before I turn 57.  It's good to have goals.

The only downside to our impending trip to Mexico - where our resort is located on the Mayan Riviera - is that the locale is cited as a risk zone for malaria.  That means I have to take a six month hiatus from donating after we get back.  I figure that my (and, more importantly, my wife's) relative happiness trumps my sense of altruistic obligation.

*****

I am pleased that Obama won the election, largely because I don't have to be exposed any longer to the national embarrassment that is Sarah Palin.  If McCain had spoken as sincerely and eloquently during his campaign as he did during his concession speech, things may have gone differently.  Unlike in Top Gun, this time around, the Ice Man did better than the Maverick.

*****

Mythbusters is on now.  So I should go.

A Halloween promise (with pics)

So here we are on October 32nd, the fateful day of Oktoberfest.  (Wherein, if you are not familiar, my wife and I descend upon Edmonton's Shaw Conference Centre with 5,000 of our closest friends for a night of Beer, Bratwurst, and drunken deBauchery.)

Amyway, while Amy was working last night, I took the boys our for about 45 minutes of trick or treating.  Here are a few pics to prove it.

↑ - The doctor and the monkey getting ready to head out for some candy booty.  YAR!

↑ - Admiring their pirate pumpkin before hitting the first house.

↑ - Nearing the end as we wend our way back home.

↑ - Uh, Dad?  Are we done yet?

↑ - Doritos!!  I'm good for another hour now!

↑ - Mmm...  High fructose corn syrup anthropomorphized to look appetizing!!

And as for the promise, well, I'm going to post more, at least for those of you who make any effort to swing by here any more.  I notice that I only posted twice for the entire month of October, and that just won't do, frankly.  I thought about doing that NaBloPoMo thing like I did a couple years ago, but that just ended up being un-fun at the end.  So you'll have to content yourselves with a (hopefully) sticking commitment that I'll have more of a presence here.  

Goddamn Twitter and Facebook stealing all my fun time...

Canadian Thanksgiving words of wisdom

A surly Declan says, while in mid-air in his father's arms:

"You know what, Daddy?  It's hard to be angry and spinning at the same time."

The financial crisis explained

Dear (erstwhile) readers,

More content and a new banner coming soon to this space.  Honest.

But first, for your edification, a thorough understanding of the cause of the financial crisis plaguing the US and affecting all the rest of us.  Reading this linked article will only take you two minutes, and it's written from the perspective of Pokémon as explained to a 14 year-old girl.

I feel smarter already, and it's not even 9 am.

Financial Crisis Explained

The simplest solutions...

... are often the best.

I bathe Declan and Tavish together every night (because it's more efficient), and they always sit in the same spots: Dex a little higher in the shallow end and Tav down in the deeper end by the drain.

Tavish regularly complains of a sore bum during and just after his bath, but never at any other time.  It is a conumdrum that has stymied me, but to which I have given very little thought outside of the bathing arena.  The solution presented itself one night last week, and he hasn't had a sore bum since. 

The conversation went something a little like this:

Tav: Daddy, my bum is sore."

Si: "Again, Tav?  Why is it always sore?"

Tav: "Don' know!"

He smiled after saying that, and wiggled his bum a little back and forth.

That's when the light bulb went off in my head.

Si: "Hey Tav, are you sitting on top of the drain plug, and rubbing your anus on the plug puller part?"

Tav: "Yeah!"

Si: "Well, if you stop doing that, you won't have a sore bum any more."

Tav: "Oh.  OK!"

Late Summer Corn Maize

A couple weekends ago, my good buddy Lance and I took our (total of) three sons to an awesome little farm about a half hour north east of the city.  There's a corn maze, a hay bale maze, a puppet show, petting zoo, wagon rides... and a compressed air Corn Cannon.

Good times had by all!

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Tav and Dex posing in front of the Arachno-Dragon.  I don't know why, but the farm had a dragon theme throughout the whole place.  We just went with it.

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There was a series of eavestroughs under these old hand pumps (sucking water from horse troughs underneath), and if you pumped fast enough, your duck could win!!  

Or fall over and get stuck time and time and time again!!

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This spiral "maze" was sort of a let down, but it gave us a reason to say, "go run around those circles as fast as you can!"  They did not disappoint.

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The entrance to the Great Prairie Corn Maze.  Since it was pushing lunch time when we entered, all we had to do was grab the nearest ear, shuck it, and pass it off to a hungry boy until we reached the exit.  It was a great way to spend the better part of an hour.

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Well and truly lost.

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Declan inspects a fuzzy caterpillar.  These guys were all over the place in the corn.  Many squished ones on the path.  We felt like saviours for our new friend here.

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One last ear of corn on the wagon ride back to the main part of the farm.

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Me!  Just in case you've forgotten what I look like.  The other bald fellow in the reflection is Lance.  We are the same sort of coiffure connoisseurs.  I love the stunned look of the employee chick coming into frame.

Uh... if you're wondering about the strings of beads around my neck, those were our "tickets" to get into the corn maze.  Tavish really enjoyed strangling himself with his, and that's why I'm wearing two.

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Tavish, apres corn, and just before we got our lunch.

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Both boys loved climbing the huge round hay bales over by the petting zoo.  We went back the very next weekend again since we had so much fun the first time.

(A similar picture makes up the new Simian Farmer banner.  Refresh the page if you don't yet see it.)

Bye!

Disparity (the good kind)

Simon sits on the living room sofa, laptop on lap, listening raptly.  Amy ambles upstairs from having gotten her Facebook fix on the computer downstairs.

Amy: What are you watching there?

Si: A TED presentation on what the Large Hadron Collider is hoping to achieve for science.

Amy:  Oh God! [walks away]  I really can't believe I married you sometimes.

Simon: [defensively]  Come on!  It's pretty much the greatest single scientific device ever created!  It just may give us the means to confirm the building blocks of the universe as they came into existence at the Big Bang!  It could...

Amy: [interrupting, kissing me on the head] Yes, dear, I know.  It's OK.  I really do know why I married you.

Si: [very coherently]  What?  Huh?

Amy:  It's 'cause you're the bomb in bed.

The stars are a little farther away

I got my form letter email back from the Canadian Space Agency late last week.  It turns out that my short-lived dreams of becoming an astronaut got grounded indefinitely, and I have been informed that my application will no longer be considered to proceed further through the selection process.

This is exactly how far I thought I'd get in my impromptu decision to apply to fly into space.  Still, there was, of course, that little part of me that couldn't help but be excited at the prospect of being selected to be trained as an astronaut.

I'm holding out hope, one day, to be able to take a trip on the Vomit Comet as well as experience a high-G test.  I'm pretty sure I'd do really well on both of those.

At least now I know how dejected Pluto must have been when it found out that it was no longer considered a planet.

Backyard fun

Amy and I are heading off to a wedding for the afternoon and evening, so in the mean time (and in between time), here are a few pics of the many I shot last weekend when the boys and I were out playing in the yard.

(I know it's time for a haircut or two.)